2024 10 23
Something that always fascinates me is how fragile life on Earth is. We are doing our best to disrupt the planet’s fragile ecosystems, and we do a great job of it, but beyond our own stupidity, it’s remarkable that life on Earth exists at all! We would not be here without the moon, for example, which stabilizes and calms our planet’s orbit and allows for the seasons, giving us time to grow crops and smell the flowers.
This morning, I read another fascinating bit of information that would also be a deal-breaker for us had science decided to act just a bit differently. That is — ice.
Most of the time, when an element in a liquid state transforms into its solid state, it gets much smaller and more dense. Water (H20), on the other hand, expands when it solidifies. This scientific anomaly is another in many that allow us humans to exist at all. Had ice followed the rules and shrunk as it formed, it wouldn’t float. If ice were to sink, the world’s oceans would’ve fully solidified and life on Earth would not be possible, or at the very least, would have been a whole lot more difficult and we would probably be single-cell organisms, frolicking in the ice while attempting to figure out how to migrate to land.
-Clayton
Chased a waterfall. Starved Rock State Park, Illinois. March, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
Something that always fascinates me is how fragile life on Earth is. We are doing our best to disrupt the planet’s fragile ecosystems, and we do a great job of it, but beyond our own stupidity, it’s remarkable that life on Earth exists at all! We would not be here without the moon, for example, which stabilizes and calms our planet’s orbit and allows for the seasons, giving us time to grow crops and smell the flowers.
This morning, I read another fascinating bit of information that would also be a deal-breaker for us had science decided to act just a bit differently. That is — ice.
Most of the time, when an element in a liquid state transforms into its solid state, it gets much smaller and more dense. Water (H20), on the other hand, expands when it solidifies. This scientific anomaly is another in many that allow us humans to exist at all. Had ice followed the rules and shrunk as it formed, it wouldn’t float. If ice were to sink, the world’s oceans would’ve fully solidified and life on Earth would not be possible, or at the very least, would have been a whole lot more difficult and we would probably be single-cell organisms, frolicking in the ice while attempting to figure out how to migrate to land.
-Clayton